On Tuesday I got my first batch of bureau cards. I had previously received one, but it wasn’t for me since it was for a CW contact before I was licensed. But this batch of 4 cards had 2 from Finland and 2 from Canada. At least they were all for me!
Tonight when I got home from work, there was a card in the mail for a contact with V26B contact in Oct on 20m SSB. It’s my first confirmed QSL for Antigua. Keep ’em coming!
73,
K2DSL
Over the past 2 weeks, even though I haven’t had any new contacts with DXCC’s I haven’t previously logged, either paper QSLs or Logbook of The World (LoTW) QSLs have come in for 4 new DXCC’s.
The confirmed DXCCs are:
Sierra Leone – 9L0W
Ireland – EI6HB
Greece – SV1JSQ
Kazakhstan – UN1L
That gives me 87 confirmed DXCC’s of which 8 are only confirmed via paper QSL and the rest are LoTW confirmed. I have 27 DXCC’s logged and not yet confirmed with all but 1 or 2 sent a QSL card from me.
I am working from home today because of a doctors appointment. I was online responding to emails when I looked and saw the cluster showing ZD8UW on Ascension Island on 17m. Turned the radio on and the first time I put my call out there he came back. Woohoo – a new DXCC for me once confirmed. I need to work from home more often ;-)
73,
K2DSL
I’ve sent a bunch of cards out via the bureau since I’ve started on HF over this past summer. A bunch means a couple hundred. It can take months to years to get a card back, if you get one at all. Well in the middle of December I received an envelope from the NJDX Association which handles the 2nd call district. My first bureau card, or so I thought. I opened it up and looked at the front and it was from LZ1250 in Bulgaria. I turned it over and noticed the mode is CW. I don’t do CW yet. I then looked at the date and it’s from March. Well, I wasn’t on HF in March yet. I looked at the year and it’s 2003. Well, that’s about 4 years before I was licensed. Definitely not me!
Now I don’t think that K2DSL was previously assigned to anyone so my best guess is that LZ1250 copied the wrong call sign down when the contact was made on 10.1 MHz (30 meters). At least it’s an interesting card. If you have a call sign similar to mine and had a contact with LZ1250 (special callsign used for one month in March 2003), send me the details of the QSO and if it’s close enough, I’ll send you the card.
Happy Holidays,
K2DSL
[Edit: Removed the space between NJ DX to make it NJDX]
Friday night into Saturday was the 24 hour TARA RTTY Melee where you can operate only 16 hours. Not sure how many hours I ended up operating but it was a couple before heading to bed and then a good portion of the day on Saturday with about 6 or so short errands around town.
I ended up with 199 contacts across 75m, 40m and 20m. Most were US with about a dozen Canadian stations and about a dozen DX stations. 199 QSOs with 66 multipliers for a score of 13,134.
Next big RTTY contest is just after the beginning of the year. I think I’ll be home from a skiing trip by then. Should be a lot of fun.
See you on the air,
K2DSL
Last night before heading up to bed, I glanced at the DX cluster info and noticed a South Africa station was spotted from a couple US stations so I flipped the radio on and tuned to 40m. The operator was ZS4U (Barney) and he was booming in. He was in the Extra portion of the band and it was my first time manually setting a split on my TS-2000 and putting my call sign out as an Extra class operator.
Setting split worked like a charm and was easy on the TS-2000. I’ll have to check but I guess I just need to switch back and forth to hear both sides of the QSO, making the xmit frequency the receive frequency when the other op is speaking. The TS-2000 makes that easy with the push of a single button.
When ZS4U was done with the QSO he was in when I tuned to the frequency, I put out my call sign but he picked up another op. When he did, the other op said hello and that Barney was booming in and he’ll stand by in case there were weaker stations that might want to try. So I put out my call sign again and Barney came right back to me. Gave me a report of 57 (he was 59) and he seemed to have no issue copying me.
Based on the distance between my grid and his, we’re about 8,017 miles apart. It’s easily my longest phone contact which previously was 6,350 miles into Kazakhstan on 20m. My previous longest on 40m was Honduras at 5,500 miles. I’ve had another contact with South Africa but it was on 20m RTTY, both with the same operator (ZS2EZ) during 2 RTTY contests.
So thank you Barney and thanks to the operator that stepped aside to let some others get a shot at ZS4U. A great way to the end day!
73,
K2DSL
This past weekend was the ARRL Sweepstakes Phone Contest. I couldn’t dedicate a large portion of the weekend to the contest with obligations on Saturday and the Giants football game from 10am-6pm on Sunday. So during the time I could get on the radio, I had a lot of fun.
Band QSOs Pts Sec 3.5 103 206 29 7 62 124 19 14 40 80 19 Total: 205 410 67
Score : 27,470
I had 2 phone contacts with Alaska and I logged contacts with 47 of the 50 states, just missing Kentucky, South Carolina and Oklahoma. As the stats above show, I logged a contact with 67 of the 80 sections. One frustrating missing section was Southern NJ. A whopping 50 miles or so south of me I couldn’t make a contact on 20, 40 or 80 meters. if I was around when 20m was open to the West Coast I probably could have gotten some of the missing sections in the US and in Canada.
What was nice, even though I’ve only just started contesting, is there were a couple of operators that recognized my call and said hello when we were making the exchange. Comments like “Nice to speak with you on phone, hope to see you in the next RTTY contest.”.
I’m going to take the Extra Class test on Friday. Would have been nice to have been an Extra during the contest so I could have slipped down into the Extra portion of the bands for additional sections (multipliers) and QSOs. But a lot of fun for a phone contest. I found it a bit more enjoyable and relaxing then one where your contacts are all international.
73,
K2DSL
This past weekend was the WAE RTTY contest. Since Daylight Savings Time ended here, 0000z is 1 hour earlier. The contest started at 7pm ET Friday night and ended 7pm ET Sunday evening. I was able to spend a good amount of waking time working the contest. I didn’t stay up later then I would have to put in extra hours. I’ll need to check what N1MM reports but I think I put in maybe 4 hours Friday and then 12-14 each day on Saturday and Sunday.
This was the first time I used QTCs and it was interesting. QTCs are more about the score and not about the contacts so I didn’t push hard asking to send/receive them. I asked a few times and whenever someone asked me, as long as I was getting a good copy on them, I took them. Probably easier to send then receive, but I’m sure I’m a weaker signal to them then they are to me. But next time, I’ll push QTCs more.
My summary looks like 420 contacts in total with 173,888 points. Remember last nights quick analysis, it consisted of 50 DXCC entities, 3 of which are the US, Alaska and Hawaii. I like the ability to make US contacts and not just international ones. Makes for more action for us little guys. I think there were 2 new DXCCs out of those 50 which were Greenland and Gabon in Africa. In a quick review once I imported the log and ran it against QRZ, it looks like I made contacts in 41 of the 50 states.
A lot of the contacts were ones I made previously. If I knock those out and all the US/Canada QSOs, there’s less then 75 new contacts in my log. I’ll go through this week and see which I might send a paper QSL card to. LOTW and eQSL were already updated. LOTW now shows me with 2,821 records uploaded and it’s jumped to over 1,007 confirmed QSLs, which should rise further over the next week as folks submit their logs to LOTW. The RTTY contesters are the best at sending to LOTW. I looked and I’m not showing any new DXCCs confirmed in LOTW yet so it is still showing 65. Maybe some of the contacts in DXCCs that previously didn’t upload their logs will do so, so even though I only contacted 2 new DXCCs, there could be contacts with ops in DXCCs that I previously contacted but don’t have confirmed yet on LOTW.
So tonight when I get home from work I’ll mess around with the data and run some reports against the data to see how things are shaking out. RTTY is so much fun!!
73,
K2DSL
This was my first CQ WW SSB contest. It turned out to be a very different experience then other contests I’ve participated in so far. First, the digital contests seem to be much easier to work and make contacts. That could be because there’s less people participating as well as that a digital contact is easier then a phone (voice) contact. The second reason is that with 100w and a dipole, you aren’t busting through any pileups. But overall, I’m happy with how things turned out. In this contest, other then to add a new multiplier, all contacts had to be DX so I there was no US-to-US contacts on then to grab a multiplier.
I ended up over the 2 days with 158 contacts. Almost all except 8 were on 20 meters with the 8 being on 40 meters. I ended up, combined with the bands, 84 countries and 25 zones with a combined score of 46,523 points. There were 11 new DXCC entities in my logbook at the end of the contest.
I was able to make my first voice contact with Alaska after a few previous RTTY contacts so that was neat. Other then Japan and countries like China and others in that area along with Austrailia, I think I was able to make a contact with all the countries I saw spotted on the band. I could actually hear Japan fairly strong but they couldn’t hear me. It wasn’t because of a pileup either as 2 strong stations were calling CQ over and over and just not able to hear me. Oh well, maybe next time.
I used my Heil Proset 5 for the first time and it worked extremely well. Even though it is light, it does make your neck a bit tired and your ears a bit sore, but taking just a min break every once in a while helps. So it was a good purchase to add to my equipment. I didn’t use the new voice keyer I purchased yet. I’ll save that for a rainy day.
There seemed to be a fair amount of activity on 15 meters but I couldn’t tune up the G5RV antenna with the Kenwood TS-2000 to put out a full 100 watts. I’d guess an external antenna tuner might do better then the internal tuner or of course a more appropriate 15m antenna would work. I’ll ponder what to do about that one.
When a new entity popped up on the band, if you weren’t quick enough, a big pileup started. For me, the most effective way is to either wait until there’s a pause after most stations put out their call and before the CQing op came back, or to just come back later. I think in almost all cases, I was able to make the contact.
I also noticed there’s a much less percentage of SSB folks which are using LOTW then RTTY folks. Within a day or two of a RTTY contest, a significant number of operators have uploaded their logs. Comparing that to this SSB contest almost a week later only 19 of the 158 contacts are confirmed on LOTW. I really wish folks used that more. I know I’d have DXCC confirmed since I have around 112 DXCC entities contacted in my log book.
So that’s my summary of my first CQ WW SSB contest. All fun!
73,
K2DSL
Came home yesterday to a large envelope from the ARRL. Inside are 2 shiny new certificates for Worked All States.
WAS #53,075 and WAS RTTY #634
I’ll have to go out and get some frames for these 2 and the certificate I received as being part of the club team in my first contest back in Sept 2007. We were 7th place in the US/Canada and 1st place in the Eastern NY Section for the 2007 September VHFQSO Party.
73,
K2DSL
During this weekends CQ WW SSB contest going on (I’ll write about that later), I received an email from W7PN (“Skip”) in Wyoming on Sunday morning. Skip is one of the operators I emailed last week looking for someone in Wyoming to have a RTTY contact with. Wyoming was the last state I needed for WAS (Worked All States) His email said if I was around around to go to 20m and see if we can make a contact.
I was in the middle of looking for QSOs on SSB within N1MM so I fired up MMTTY and went to the frequency he suggested. I called CQ a few times before realizing as I rushed to get to RTTY going that I didn’t have my SignaLink on. Powered up the SignaLink interface and called CQ a few more times. Had a DM* station contact me but I told him that I was waiting for someone. A couple of calls later and Skip came back to me for the QSO. Had perfect copy on him. We exchanged a signal report and I probably thanked him half a dozen times before ending the QSO. After Skip uploads his log to LOTW it should show I have all states confirmed in Basic WAS (any mode/any band) and RTTY WAS. I’ll put in for those awards once he’s done.
Many thanks to WP7N for going all out in contacting me and helping me get my first ARRL award!
73,
K2DSL